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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: Album Reviews

  • Review: Bruce Springsteen’s “Working on a Dream”

    bruceAs one of the web’s most esteemed (and self-dubbed) Bruce Springsteen scholars, I’ve been trying for weeks to figure out what it is about Working on a Dream that enraptures me so. It’s something other than the most obvious answer, which is “because it’s Springsteen, and I love Springsteen.” That particular answer doesn’t really explain away Human Touch and The Ghost of Tom Joad, after all. No, I’ve decided that there’s a very strange explanation for this affection: Working on a Dream doesn’t really sound much like Springsteen at damn old all.

    Let me explain. We’re all grown-ups here; we all know that rockers stagnate as they age. Once-great artists in their twilight years are often reduced to pale imitations; oh, sure, their new albums may offer a peak or two between songs that NOBODY WILL EVER EVER REMEMBER lesser compositions, but how often do they retain their creative vigor, the youthful viscera of their most hungry recordings? It’s rare, indeed, and I could go into a treatise of once-great artists plagued by this malaise, but it’d be reductive and full of lots of bitterness towards the Stones.

    So it’s with great pride for my beloved Boss that I proclaim: after floundering creatively for the better part of the 90s treading water with undercooked versions of old-school Springsteen, new-millenium Bruce has bounced back, creatively if not commercially, through several batches of lively (and just plain GOOD) tunes and a wise refusal to adhere slavishly to his signature sound. This is a Bruce competing with the litany of new kids highjacking his sound all the way to critical acclaim, not a Bruce obsessing over his glory days. (Ha!)

    And Working on a Dream sounds terrific. Bruce’s domestic bliss yields his best returns since domestic dischord proved a qualitative boon for him on 1987’s Tunnel of Love. This time, he’s writing shiny retro pop tunes, for the most part planted firmly in the soil of 60s pop. There’s a lot of Brill Building songwriting, and a lot of Phil Spector moments–think back to The River, and try to imagine an album of variances on “I Wanna Marry You”. Shoulda-been single “My Lucky Day” is the sunniest thing I’ve heard from any artist in quite a while, all tight harmonies and jangly guitars. The title track sounds like an outtake from Magic, albeit a particularly optimistic one. And the only indication that checkout-girl fantasy “Queen of the Supermarket” didn’t come from the era that it so effortlessly evokes is the surprise f-bomb. (And I’d be remiss not to mention “This Life”, which fits the milieu quite nicely, but has the best hook on the album, a soaring melody that demands summer mix slots from everybody that listens.)

    In fact, Springsteen rarely missteps here. Opening up with an 8-minute folk tale (“Outlaw Pete”) might not have not been the best harbinger of things to come, and it’s far from the album’s strongest song, but it’s fascinating to listen to the keyboard-spackled Springsteen-by-way-of-Killers-by-way-of-Springsteen paradox he’s created for himself as the song’s tone. And deep cut “Kingdom of Days” threatens to be really boring, but smacks you with a killer second chorus while you’re napping. (There’s all sorts of interesting stuff nestled in the album’s second half, too–the folksy “Tomorrow Never Knows” sounds kind of Seeger Session-y, and “Surprise, Surprise” sounds like someone picked a fistful of these retro pop tunes that hopefully will prove to be new-Springsteen’s signature, and found this polished beauty among their ranks.) If there’s a misstep, it’s “Good Eye”, full of ugly distorted vocals and an overabundance of harmonica–sure, it might be the worst thing Bruce has come up with since, well, Human Touch, but residing as it does in the midst of such an impressive playlist, I’m sure we can all be understanding.

    (Side note: “The Last Carnival” concludes with an a cappella outro of wordless harmonies. It sounds fantastic, but it’s interesting to note that it sounds an awful lot like the end of “Slapped Actress” by the Hold Steady, perhaps the band most notorious for accusations of E Street aspirations. Homage, or simple curiosity? Either way, it’s cool.)

    Pretty much universally terrific, Working on a Dream is Bruce Springsteen’s best post-heyday record. There’s an energy and a craft here that most aging artists tend to shy away from; the songs are great, the arrangements impeccable, the production gloriously glossy. Bruce has graduated from young, grungy small-town escapee to domesticated, middle-aged troubador–and manages, in the process, not to sound worse for the wear. It’s terrific work, and I can only hope it entices back those who may have bailed on the Boss.

    He may take a while to find his footing, but there’s a crucial truth at play here: you never doubt The Boss.

  • CriticClash: Seal’s Soul

    sealCovers albums are a tricky concept. Not too many folks have gotten it right. While I’d imagine it’s fun and maybe even challenging to tackle music made popular by someone else, a lot of times those songs are so identifiable with the original artist(s) that your album winds up sounding more like well-produced karaoke than anything else.

    This is the problem that plagues British singer Seal on his sixth studio effort, entitled “Soul”. While the album itself is sung beautifully, the songs he chooses to cover are songs that were sung beautifully the first time around. And the second. And the third. The album might have been a bit more interesting had Seal decided to tackle some songs that are less familiar, but, let’s be honest here. How many versions of “A Change is Gonna Come” do you really need to hear when Sam Cooke’s original is still the definitive version?

    Seal obviously put his heart into this recording, on which he gives us the best vocals of his entire career. “Soul”‘s major redeeming quality, actually, is Seal’s voice. Gravelly and soulful, he does a good job with songs like Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”, but after a while, you realize that you still want to hear that voice, just performing Seal’s material, not someone else’s.

    The album’s biggest problem, aside from the very unimaginative song choices, is the production. David Foster was smart enough to back Seal with a live band, but wound up runining some of the songs with obnoxious amounts of horns and strings. The reliance on horns especially, occasionally makes this album sound more like “Seal Does Vegas!!” than it does Seal sings soul classics.

    Ultimately, though, it comes down to the material. The songs are top-notch, but the definitive versions have been made already and nothing more can be added to them. Not that many folks haven’t tried. Remember UB40’s remake of Al Green’s “Here I Am (Come & Take Me)”? How about Amii Stewart’s disco version of Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood”? The six million versions of “People Get Ready” in existence? Seal covers all these songs here, and while his versions are all pleasant, they’re also totally unnecessary. Seal wrings every bit of emotion out of “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World” and STILL can’t touch James Brown’s original. Even when Seal and Foster try to add a bit of contemporary bounce to Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me”, all it winds up doing is reminding me of the techno-funk remake of the song that Earth, Wind & Fire’s Maurice White did back in 1985.

    Seal has the right idea when he tackles the comparatively unknown “Free” by Deniece Williams. He’d have served himself much better by going with material that wasn’t so obvious. He’d have been BEST served by following the template that’s given him a twenty-year career and stuck with his own material.

  • CriticClash: Duncan Sheik’s Whisper House

    duncanThe recent arrival of Duncan Sheik’s new studio album, his sixth, called The Whisper House offers an occasion to thank heavens, once again, that Duncan Sheik and musical theater have found each other.  In another bygone era, Duncan Sheik might have been a world class superstar for his sophisticated pop melodies, the elegant orchestrations they’re often set to, the mysterious melancholy and dark humor of his lyrics, and the mordant understatement of his singing.  Even at the peak of his pop stardom, when songs like “Barely Breathing” and “She Runs Away” found their improbable way onto Top 40 radio playlists, there was something incongruous and off-putting about Sheik’s lack of either angst or bombast.  The first time I heard his self-titled 1996 debut album, I thought the whole thing entirely too wispy and pale.  In hindsight, there are few records from that time period that have aged better.

    Nevertheless, Sheik’s career as a pop singer has met with increasing indifference for the last decade, and certainly not because he hasn’t been making worthwhile records.  But that isn’t to say his career as a composer has been flagging.  In fact, Whisper House follows up on what is indisputably Sheik’s greatest musical success – the score for the Broadway musical Spring Awakening, which won him two Tony Awards (for score and orchestrations) in 2007, and, if you were to survey the nation’s high school drama geeks, is probably the coolest Broadway musical of this decade.  Sheik’s relationship with musical theater is completely symbiotic – Sheik and Broadway have benefited from each other equally in terms of establishing claims on the hearts of a previously under-served constituency of earnest, dramatically inclined teens and twenty-somethings with relationship issues.

    Spring Awakening was not Sheik’s first theatrical venture – his 2001 album Phantom Moon (which earned Sheik lingering and not altogether wrong-headed comparisons to Nick Drake) was a collaboration with Spring Awakening lyricist Steven Sater which had aspirations to the stage, and he also contributed to the off-Broadway show Songs from an Unmade Bed.  It’s heartening, then, to see that Sheik’s making the best of his unexpected resurgence with Whisper House, an album’s worth of songs taken from the forthcoming musical of the same name about a young boy who, after his father perishes in World War II, is sent to live with his creepy Aunt Lilly in a haunted lighthouse.  And though the album could very easily have just been the sort of product that whets the public appetite for an even bigger, more expensive product, Whisper House works quite well as a stand-alone pop album – one of Sheik’s strongest and most coherent, at that.

    The conceptual structure of the record certainly helps:  it doesn’t try to tell a story so much as to establish a thematic frame for the songs to fill, along with a set of characters to populate the songs with.  There’s a purposefulness and cohesiveness to Whisper House that had been lacking on some of Sheik’s previous records.   Also helping matters is the sustained presence of singer Holly Brook who duets with Sheik on many of these songs, and the wind ensemble directed by Simon Hale, which adds a storybook sense of magic to these songs.  Brook and Hale’s contributions are highlighted on the lovely, contemplative “And Now We Sing”, which Brook sings mostly solo and which closes with a gorgeous and, indeed, haunting extended instrumental coda.

    Sheik’s and Brook’s voices blend beautifully in harmony, but to my ears, they sound even better in “conversation”, as on the opening track “It’s Better To Be Dead”, in which the two singers trade verses, offering up a grim (however grand) parade of the various living denizens of the old lighthouse, briefly hinting at each of their unfortunate fates, as each somberly leering verse ends with the nagging affirmation that they’d all be “better off dead”.  It’s a great start to the record, coming off like one of those costume-y, British vaudevillian macabre ballads from the 1890’s, a vibe that occasionally, momentarily resurfaces throughout the album, most effectively on “The Tale of Solomon Snell”, which sounds like a Lemony Snickett story in song.

    But none of this is pastiche, and in fact, the bulk of the album sounds, appropriately enough, like the proper follow-up to Sheik’s 2006 album White Limousine.   With an orchestral tide of buzzy keyboards and choppy rock guitars on its anthemic chorus, the ebulliently threatening lead single “We’re Here To Tell You” is the closest Sheik has come to shoo-in radio fodder since his 2002 single “On a High” became an unexpected club hit.  And even though they clearly advance the narrative theme, songs like “Play Your Part” and “Take a Bow” don’t require the bigger picture context to be appreciated on their own as adorably (but not oppressively) snappy pop songs.  On the other hand, with their cloying encouragements and obvious theatrical metaphors, they seem destined to become staples of the high school show choir canon – this despite the fact that they both seem more ironic than inspirational in the actual context of the story.

    Also, in the age of iTunes and digital downloads, it’s worth mentioning that the physical CD version of Whisper House comes in an lovely package, a sturdy tri-fold digipack covered in character illustrations, featuring an illustrated booklet that offers up a synopsis of the story in storybook excerpts to go with each of the album’s 10 songs (on the last few pages, the words become more obscured so as not to give away the ending).  Not only does this CD have me excited about the actual musical, it’s got me excited about Duncan Sheik’s songs.  Again.